Brockwell Hall has been a fixture of Brockwell Park since 1813 although in recent decades has remained underused. We are very pleased to announce that a proposal launched in partnership between Lambeth Council and the Brockwell Park Community Partners to renovate the hall has been initially approved by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).
This means that the a programme of work can commence to design both how the hall could be improved and made fully open to the public, as well as looking at how the hall can be used as a venue to host weddings and other events to raise money for the park. The Brockwell Park Partnership Board has reviewed the management structure for this project and it will replicate the management structure for the successful HLF funded projected currently renovating Norwood Cemetery and the programme that repaired the landscape in the park a decade ago.
The first stage of the work is now up and running and it’s aim is to produce a fully working proposal for the hall along with plans for renovation and rebuilding by the end of 2020. After that stage two of the HLF process will being and if all goes well the hall will reopen refurbished and in it’s new role in 2022.
As your Councillors in our 2018 manifesto we committed to moving the park away from reliance on large music festivals as a income generation tool. Due to nearly a decade of austerity – in which the parks budget in Lambeth has been forced by successive Tory led governments Westminster to shrink by millions of pounds – our parks have been struggling for money. Last year a large music festival was held in the park and this year a far smaller version is provisionally set to go ahead. Whilst this will raise money that goes directly into the park this is not sustainable in the long term, even though we have sought to manage music festivals in the park far better than has been done in the past.
To this end we secured a review of the events policy, which is set to to recommend dropping overly disruptive targets for “event days” in the park as well providing further safeguards on events. We also have been looking at other long term measures to regenerate the park such as the regeneration of the football pitches so they can be used by the community and commercially by five-a-side leagues.
We have been working closely with Brockwell Park Community Partners on all of these proposals and they have played a major role in realising these projects. The organisations that make the partnership play a vital role in keeping the park open for the 1000s of people from our community that use it every day. It costs over £8000 a week to keep Brockwell Park running and we are determined to make it immune from the impact of any further budgetary pressure. Community driven projects like these can integrate with the park to provide long term financial stability for Brockwell park.
Thurlow Park News 